And When We Say Our Last Goodbye…: In Memory of and Salute to Stafford Hood

Each generation out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. (Fanon, 1961).

Our quest is to retrieve from near obscurity the work of early contributors and pioneering African American scholars whose work had been excluded from what is taught as the history of educational evaluation research in the United States. Whether this exclusion has been by accident or design, we leave for others to answer. We seek simply to acknowledge, illuminate, and verify our roots as African American evaluators because it is professionally and personally important for us to claim this heritage for the benefit of others who will follow (Hood, 2017, p. 263).

And there it is. Enough said.

When the first call came on Monday, 16 January (Rev Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) I was enroute to Champaign on I-57 South, returning from a research study/study abroad/holiday in Namibia, southern Africa after the December 2022–January 2023 winter break. While this first call did not go through, the second one did and brought news of the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Stafford Hood. An outpouring of sympathy, tears, and utter shock followed on from this call as the news spread, and this continued for what seems like months. The phone calls, texts, and emails were overwhelming in those first weeks and were filled with immense grief and sorrow. Often with a lump in my throat as they offered me their own condolences, I would remind friends, colleagues and associates who knew of our working and laboring together that his wife, Denice, would continue to need (y)our thoughts and prayers. I also reminded them that Stafford was about the work…and finishing the work.

Hood's quote above reflects the very spirit of the work that he was about, and for those that knew him, he had a way of stating the obvious with a smirk, sometimes with a nasal exhaled puff of air that would reinforce the matter of fact. In a Fanonian sense, Hood has helped to discover a purpose and mission for those of us who have histories not obvious in the field of evaluation – excluded histories, not told or known. ¹ In fact, that quote is from Hood's final published paper in AJE, the second-to-last installment in the Nobody Knows My Name ² historical and archival evaluation project that he birthed with his foundational (Hood, 2001) paper in the New Directions for Evaluation issue on responsive evaluation.

His 2017 AJE paper, a version of a keynote given at the Eastern Evaluation Research Society's 2016 Eleanor Chelimisky Forum, is as much a call to action as it is an important contribution to the Nobody Knows My Name project. Much like other installments in that project, the larger work lay in contextualizing the moment in which these early evaluators lived and worked, including the influence they had on the larger field. As I reread the Hood's article on Ambrose Caliver, appointed as specialist in the Department of the Interior's U.S. Office of Education in 1931, it was not long before I realized that not only had I read earlier versions of it during its development but also, I had been with him at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center in Founder's Library when we were pulling Caliver's files.

Over the memorable research trips Stafford and I made to the Founder's Library during the period when we were making research trips to Washington, DC, while we were expanding entries of the Nobody Know My Name project, I recall the excitement over the Caliver files vividly. Typically, and as it was when we were in Founder's Library, there were plenty of distractions on the way and in the archives. Our research visits to Howard University would involve at least three staples as part of our trips to the library: decent food and drink with a preference for soul food in the nation's capital, an opportunity to reminisce about the incredible privilege and responsibility to build on the unknown histories of evaluation, and a visit to our fraternity's (Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.) monument and material culture on the campus. Without question, our visit to the Howard University archives were a high point in our collaborative, archival research endeavors. Each trip, not unlike the one we made during the visit to delve into Caliver's files, was always incomplete because we would inevitably find more documents than we anticipated and reams of miscellany files to delve into to build a full and rich story. And of course, there will always be another Nobody Knows My Name project story to tell. As Hood's 2017 paper shows, while he was preparing one essay in the project, we were preparing another one on Charles H. Thompson, the founding editor of the Journal of Negro Education (Hood & Hopson, 2018).

And when we say our last goodbye, we love and remember Stafford Louis Hood, tireless advocate and drum major for justice, unwavering and faithful friend, generous and selfless bridge builder, and mentor in the field of evaluation. Hood personified the Bridge Builder in the poem by W.A. Dromgoole—who crossed the sullen tide and had the foresight to help “a fellow pilgrim near,” undeterred by the effort and strength to create a bridge “at evening tide.” Instead, Hood set his goal and mission to create spaces, pathways, and opportunities for those of us who needed to cross “the chasm, deep and wide” in the future. The final lines of the poem epitomize the work Hood was about and, like Fanon, the mission undone, to be continued:

“This chasm that has been as naught to me

To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;

He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;

Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”